Cinema has always sought to be an art of synthesis, not only by
wedding art and science and integrating the aesthetic beauty of the
other art forms, but also through attempting to involve all of the
viewer’s senses, not just the dominant ones of sight and hearing, in
the artistic experience of motion pictures. Bearing witness to this
are the previous century’s myriad initiatives to transform the
movies into a multisensory experience. Nonetheless, none of
these proposals has managed to take hold and, for now, film is an
art form enjoyed strictly in audiovisual terms. That said, given the
context of ever-dwindling movie theater audiences, could the
incorporation of the olfactory attract spectators once again? In
this paper we employ an empathy and identification with characters
(EIC) scale to analyze whether the incorporation of smells
increases enjoyment in the viewing of an audiovisual production –
in this case, the multisensory short film Xmile – by an experimental
group (with scents) and a control group (without scents). The
results indicate that with the incorporation of scents viewers’ identify
much more with the fictional characters and further enjoy the
experience.
